Ten Weeks into Based Ballers Season 2, the standings sheet that lands on my perch reads less like a race and more like a receipt. At the top, in ink so bold it barely needs a reporter, sit Birdo's Magik Mushrooms at 8-2, having scored 106 runs and surrendered 33. That is a run differential of plus-73, and it is the sort of number that makes the rest of the league check their bats for holes. Zeph, of course, has done this before. His TJD club went 15-0 through the Season 1 playoffs — still the loudest single line in this paper's history, and the record for the biggest blowout in league annals belongs to him at plus-19. So when the Mushrooms buried Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough 10-0 and did the same arithmetic to Gareth's Syndicate 10-0, nobody in the press box was reaching for the smelling salts. This is what a Zeph team does. It scores early, it scores often, and it hands the scoreboard operator a cramp. And yet — a wrinkle. The one dugout to solve the Mushrooms so far belongs to Love. In Week 10 at Boo's home yard, Boo's Dinger Brigade took Birdo to the wall and won 10-9, the rarest result of the young season: Zeph on the wrong end of a one-run game. It was Love's second one-run heist in the sample; his Brigade also nicked Chatter 6-4 earlier. Boo's sit second at 6-4, a club that scores in bunches (84 runs for) and gives them right back (73 against). Their calling card is the late detonation — anyone who watched them drop six in the ninth at Mario Stadium knows the Brigade would rather win a track meet than a chess match. Bunched right behind them is Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough, also 6-4 but built from the opposite blueprint. Where Boo's outscores its problems, Chatter smothers them. The club has posted a pair of shutouts already — Peach's 7-0 whitewash of Granbel at Bowser's Castle and a 7-0 blanking of the same Jane Goodall's Nightmare in Week 10 — and a 10-0 dismantling of the Weed Sox in between. Fifty-one runs for, fifty-three against; this is a team that wins the games it should and loses the ones it must. Daisy's two-way Sundays remain the most honest work in the league. The middle of the table is a coin flip. Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare sits exactly at .500, 5-5, with a plus-minus so slim (55 for, 56 against) it might as well be a rounding error. Granbel has a signature win already — an 11-5 handling of the Weed Sox and an early 8-6 conquest of the mighty Mushrooms back in the season's first breath, proof the Nightmare can wake up and bite anybody. It can also be flattened, as the two Chatter shutouts attest. Which brings us to the season's quiet disappointment. Gareth is, by long-standing reputation, a god with Piantas — and his Da Plumber Syndicate sits fifth at 4-6, outscored 76-55. The Syndicate has flashes: a 9-8 clawback over Luigi's Had Enough at Donkey Kong Jungle, a 9-6 road win at Boo's. But two blowout losses to Zeph do ugly things to a run differential, and for a manager of Gareth's pedigree, fifth place is a sentence he'll want appealed. And at the bottom, where the smoke never quite clears, are Ylander's Weed Sox. One win, nine losses, 28 runs scored and 88 allowed — the sort of split that suggests the offense forgot its bat and the pitching forgot its glove. The lone bright spot arrived in Week 10, when the Sox climbed out of an early hole to edge the Syndicate 9-8 and finally exhale. It was, for one Sunday at Weed Garden, enough. The other nine Sundays have been long ones. A few individual lines worth framing for the season wall. Diddy Kong has been the most unhittable arm going, fanning 16 in a single game. Blue Magikoopa put up a six-hit afternoon, matching the club-record kind of day the great Toadsworth is known for. Hammer Bro — already anointed the season's MVP in barroom consensus — drove in five in a game to lead the RBI board. And Fire Bro owns a curious trilogy of the record book at once: most home runs in a game (two), the longest bomb of the year (a towering 97 feet), and, in a reminder that this game humbles everyone, the most strikeouts in a single game (four). A man of extremes, that one. — Inky the Blooper